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　　LETTER 394

　　CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

　　[P.M. May 16, 1826.]

　　Dear B.B.—I have had no spirits lately to begin a letter to you, though I am under obligations to you (how many!) for your neat little poem, 'Tis just what it professes to be, a simple tribute in chaste verse, serious and sincere. I do not know how Friends will relish it, but we out-lyers, Honorary Friends, like it very well. I have had my head and ears stuff'd up with the East winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge writing to me a week or two since begins his note—"Summer has set in with its usual Severity." A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling hypocrites of Mays wither me to death. My head has been a ringing Chaos, like the day the winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a weather-cock, before the Quarters were made. In the street, with the blended noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened, but in a room the hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a Sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch Hood has done, which he calls Very Deaf Indeed? It is of a good naturd stupid looking old gentleman, whom a footpad has stopt, but for his extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants; the unconscious old gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I chuse a very little bit of paper, for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for I miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises (almost imperceptibly to you) in a silent reader. I seem too deaf to see what I read. But with a touch or two of returning Zephyr my head will melt. What Lyes you Poets tell about the May! It is the most ungenial part of the Year, cold crocuses, cold primroses, you take your blossoms in Ice —a painted Sun—

　　Unmeaning joy around appears,

　　And Nature smiles as if she sneers.

　　It is ill with me when I begin to look which way the wind sits. Ten years ago I literally did not know the point from the broad end of the Vane, which it was the [?that] indicated the Quarter. I hope these ill winds have blowd over you, as they do thro' me. Kindest rememb'ces to you and yours. C.L.

　　["Your neat little poem." It is not possible to trace this poem. Probably, I think, the "Stanzas written for a blank leaf in Sewell's History of the Quakers," printed in A Widow's Tale, 1827.

　　"George 3." Byron's "Vision of Judgment" thus closes:—

　　King George slipp'd into Heaven for one;

　　And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,

　　I left him practising the hundredth psalm.

　　This is Hood's sketch, in his Whims and Oddities:—

　　[Illustration: "Very deaf indeed."]

　　"Unmeaning joy around appears…" I have not found this.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6